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The proliferation of city and state building energy efficiency codes, combined with the eagerness of building owners to seek LEED ratings, tells me that policymakers and the market are increasingly demanding energy efficiency in new construction. But, as I asked in a post published in February, what about the buildings already standing?

In that post, I reported how this challenge is viewed by Reuben Schwartz, the Residential Energy Programs Manager for the City and County of San Francisco. “I am not at all worried about building new energy-efficient homes,” he said. “It can be done. It has been done. I am really worried about the 98% of the other homes that are out there.”

Take California as an example. The California Energy Commission (CEC) is charged with implementing AB 758, which authorizes the commission to develop a comprehensive program to reduce energy consumption in existing buildings. In December 2010, Panama Bartholomy, then the Deputy Director of the CEC's Efficiency and Renewables Division, framed the scope of the daunting task facing policymakers:

The existing building sector is critically important for our energy and environmental goals as 72% of California’s 13 million residential buildings and over 5 billion square feet of commercial structures were built before the implementation of California’s energy efficiency building code (Title 24) in the early 1980’s. This means that 3 out of 4 homes in California have never had to comply with any energy efficiency requirements whatsoever. While Title 24 has improved building efficiency by more than 50%, these technologies have not been applied to existing buildings in a comprehensive manner.

A white paper published last month by the California Clean Energy Fund (CalCEF) recommends how policymakers can go about harvesting energy savings from the state’s existing homes. “At its heart,” Lori Bamberger told me, “this paper tries to present a way for policymakers to think about catalyzing the energy efficiency market transformation of single-family homes by looking not only at the environmental and energy side but by looking at people and what they do in their everyday lives, how they live and exist in their homes, including the transactions they engage in normally.”

“We suggest it’s not just about financing not just about disclosure,” she adds. “It’s about thinking about people when they are already acting and tucking into that an energy efficiency action, so it becomes a smaller part of a bigger action and doesn’t require so much effort or so much financial wherewithal as it does when we’re thinking about stand-alone efficiency improvements.”

Bamberger, the lead author of Pulling the Trigger: Increasing Home Energy Savings, is a CalCEF Entrepreneur-in-Residence and formerly a high-ranking official with U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the San Francisco Mayor's Housing Office.

CalCEF and its partners made a concerted effort, Bamberger says, to solicit input from a diverse group of stakeholders, including experts from the real estate, banking, labor, and energy sectors, to arrive at the recommendations included in the paper. “Too often policymakers and policy exist in a silo,” she says. “You’ve got the banking and housing finance silo … and then you have the energy and environment silo for policy – both of which are oriented to achieving really important things – but it’s hard when they have to interact with each other.”

The report identifies four categories of actions – disclose, enforce, incentivize, and finance – to be implemented at three trigger moments: the time of sale, time of renovation, or time of energy rate tier increase. “We call them ‘salient moments,’ in which homeowners of all income levels make important decisions and often engage in a large financial transaction, or try to act to avert a large financial penalty,” Bamberger says.

Examples of the recommendations include:

- Disclose the energy costs and efficiency of a home at the time of sale and standardize an energy feature list for all the Multiple Listing Services (MLS).

- Broaden the distribution of utilities’ tier-alert notifications to all ratepayers and include warnings on the long-term costs of high-tier rates, offering consumers that remain in upper energy rate tiers an energy efficiency upgrade – and funds from averted costs – to reduce consumption.

One of the easiest things California could do, Bamberger says, is to require disclosure of a home’s energy performance to the prospective buyer at the time of sale. This is authorized under AB 758 but has not been implemented. The report recommends that policymakers provide a summary of the operational history of the home, basically a utility bill summary, and come up with an asset rating, a neutral determination if the home itself is efficient, regardless of occupants’ energy consumption.